Well, really. I’ve probably said this before…but I’ll simply have to repeat myself then. This is one of those times I just have to shake my grizzled head and croak with the Wicked Witch of the North, ‘What a world, what a world.’

A kind and helpful reader, Chris of the blog Intelligent Life, alerted me to this horrible story in a comment on another story about gangs of religious thugs terrorizing people. There’s just no end to it, it seems.

Sanika Bapat, another post-graduate scholar merely questioned, ‘‘Why did they tear a Shivaji manuscript from this library? Are they Shivaji worshippers or patriots? They are worse than any militia. We are another Taliban now.’’ People sitting outside the

Okay, what’s the deal with Judith Butler. Why does everyone who writes about her call her a celebrity or a superstar. A superstar?? Someone who teaches gender studies at Berkeley? A superstar?

Berkeley’s Judith Butler, a superstar of gender and literary studies, drew a packed house with her analysis of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s bad grammar and slippery use of the term “sovereignty.”

I’m not making it up, that’s from the Boston Globe, from a story on the MLA convention. Not a very affectionate or over-impressed story, either – and yet Scott Jaschik calls Butler a superstar. Well if she got married in Las Vegas and then had the marriage annulled the next day, would we hear about it? … Read the rest

I read something interesting and even (very slightly) encouraging in a month-old New York Times magazine article on Pakistan by Barry Bearak.

Government by ”the mullahs” has long been a dreaded prospect by the vast majority of Pakistanis with less doctrinaire views, and the M.M.A.’s unexpected victories intensified fears that ”Talibanization” was creeping its way across the land.

It is good to know that the vast majority of Pakistanis (which I think is what that not very clear clause means: the vast majority of Pakistanis, who have less doctrinaire views, as opposed to the vast majority of Pakistanis-with-less-doctrinaire-views, which of course could be a much smaller number) dread the prospect of government by the mullahs. But it’s only a little … Read the rest

The World Service, part 2. Another thing I heard this morning, while standing around with my nose in my first cup of coffee (or perhaps it was the second) and waiting for the living room to warm up a little, was a lively and too-brief discussion of the vexed question: does it matter if movies tell enormous lies about history? The historian Anthony Beevor argued that it does, some entertainment boffin whose name I instantly forgot argued (of course) that it doesn’t. If I’ve heard the boffin’s argument once I’ve heard it a thousand times. Movies are movies, they have to entertain (what does he mean ‘have to’?), they have to tell a story; nobody cares about the truth they … Read the rest

I heard something very irritating on the BBC World Service on the radio early this morning as I was bumbling around in waking-up mode. In beginning a feature on the religious avowals being made by all nine Democratic presidential candidates, the reporter said ‘The United States is a deeply devout country…’ I gave a kind of mental yowl of disgust and rage. It is not! It does have a lot of religious believers in it, to be sure, but the figure is not 100% yet! And it is possible to ignore the stuff most of the time. Really it is. People who’ve never been here will hear that kind of thing and imagine that every other building is a … Read the rest